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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
H-0123-1, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill”
Roy Ham grew up in Ashe County, North Carolina. He recalls wading through heavy snowfalls, milk bucket in hand, to attend school. He left shortly before high school graduation to contribute to the war effort on the home front, but eventually returned to earn a high school diploma before entering the working world. What Ham did for a living most of his life is not entirely clear, although he has spent a lot of time making stringed instruments and plenty of time having fun. This interview is less useful for gleaning information about the industrializing South than it is for illustrating a life rich in storytelling and song. Skim the interview for more than one anecdote about ghosts; sleeping in a ditch after an evening at the movies; mistaking groundhogs for polecats; telling lies; and doing on-stage back flips at a concert. Listen for some music. This interview is captivating; it may or may not be useful.
Roy Ham tells stories and sings his way through an interview that reveals more about Ham the character than it does about the industrializing South.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Start with your family. Were your family originally from Ashe County?
I was born in 1925 in Ashe County. My daddy had always been a resident of Ashe County. My mother was from Allegheny County. I was born in 1925 in Helton Township, and that's where I made my life until I left Ashe County.
How old were you then?
I left in '47; I must have been twenty-two.
You're a little bit older than my mother, then. She left about the same time, but she was only eighteen, I guess, when she left.
My Grandfather Ham always lived with us until the ripe old age of ninety-one.
Boy, he lived a long time.
And he'd never been sick, and I never heard him say a cuss word of any kind.
Had the Ham's always lived in Ashe County as far back as you can remember?
As far back as I could remember. I reckon my great-grandfather Ham lived over on Piney; part of it's in Ashe County, and part of it's in Alleghany County. I believe that's right. And my mother's people were more in Alleghany and Wilkes. She was a Church from Alleghany County. And I lived there until I left in 1947. And we moved one time that I remember, from the old house into a new house, and it was just across the road.
Is this where your mother's living now?
That's where my mother's living right now.
Is your second house?
Yes. That's the only time that we ever moved, is from the old house that was across the road into the new one. There were seven of us in the family. That included five children, Dad and Mother. I guess Grandpa made eight in the family.
Were the other kids older than you?
I have one brother that's older than I am. Three brothers and one sister.
Was your family real close?
Yes, very definitely. We didn't have no money, no nothing, but we were a real happy, and we were all close together, and we're still close together. We are all living except my father passed away nine years ago. And we all tried to watch out after each other instead of quarrelling like a good many families do?
Yes.
We were real close.
Did you remember any fights or anything
We had very few of those. We had to play together, and we didn't have any fistfights. We'd get mad and fuss at each other a little bit. And when I was five years old I started to grade school down at Helton two miles from home. We had to walk every day. And sometimes when winter would set in along about October, we'd have snow the biggest part of the time until April the following summer.
Gosh.
And most of the time we'd wade snow, a lot of times up to our
knees,
Bet it don't snow like that anymore.
No, it don't even snow up there. The winters have changed in that part of the country. And we always had to take a biscuit with something in it for lunch. And the wintertime, sometimes the children at that school would take milk and bread to school in a bucket and hang it out the window in the winter and keep it cool. Sometimes we'd wrap up an onion and stick it in our pocket to flavor the milk and bread. That was pretty good eating.
You liked that?
Yes, ma'am. We didn't have any lunchrooms, period,
when we went to school.
That was further from home than Helton was, wasn't it?
Yes. Some of the things that we done down at Helton, I guess people would
frown on it now. We had a well. We didn't have running water
like we've got now. All the toilets were outside, and we had
one well for all of us to drink from. It had a pump handle on it. And
one day this boy who was in a grade younger than I was, but we had to
walk two miles every day together, and one day he'd been
playing pretty hard at lunch. And this new stuff that they'd
started putting in wells, chlorine,
And we all cried a little bit; we thought it was poisoned. And one day he was out sailing ships out in Helton Creek, and this same young fellow stumbled and fell and got wet all over, and he had to stay at school wet all day, the rest of the evening, before he could walk the two miles home to get dry clothes, he had to stay at school in wet clothes.
Poor kid. He just had it all on him, didn't he?
Yes, he did. It was nothing unusual to see a family, maybe two or three children, eating out of the same bucket of milk and bread. And you'd take a turn about with your spoon—each one had a different spoon—but if one person would get out of line and try to get a bite extra, the others would whack him with the spoon handle.
When I got old enough to get a job, I quit school and went to the hospital to work.
Is this when it was still new?
Still new. I worked for eighty-four hours a week for twenty dollars a month.
That's a lot, for hardly anything.
That way I was making five cents an hour. One nickel an hour.
What kind of stuff did they have you doing?
Cleaning up the hospital, and orderly. At that time that was just about everything except giving shots.
Then you'd have to be a nurse or a doctor or something.
Well, I'd do most anything a nurse could except give shots.
How old were you when you took that job?
I was eighteen.
So did you finish high school? Not quite?
Not at that time. I finished high school, but I stayed there six months or something, and then I went to Norfolk, Virginia, to work in the shipyard. And I was awfully homesick. I was used to this pure mountain water, and then went to Norfolk in the swamps. You know, that's the Dismal Swamp? And the water tastes rotten. You'd take a bath, and the water would run down across your lip and you could taste it, and it was terrible after being used to the mountain water. And I was awfully homesick, but the War was going on. Another thing that made me sick, I thought people ought to work like us hillbillies to try to make a living, and they weren't. They'd come in the shipyard and just lay down; they didn't care whether they got any work done or not. That went on. And on several occasions I was called on not to try to work and get all the work done, so I'd have enough to do the rest of the day.
Was this by your fellow workers or your boss?
It was the supervisor. And one of the biggest experiences that I had there was, they brought a ship in that had been sunk in Pearl Harbor, the ship "The Honolulu." It was a cruiser. I believe your daddy told me he saw that ship sunk.
Yes, he was over there.
He was in Pearl Harbor when it was sunk. The first day that they turned it over to the workers to go aboard, I went aboard to help fix that ship, to put it back in the water. Well, we had done all the work that we were permitted to do on this particular day, and the gentleman that I was working with was a pipe fitter, or plumber as you'd call it in real life, and I was his helper. I was close to nineteen. And we'd crawl back in the ballast tanks and went to sleep.
And all at once Sladen commenced to kicking and hollering and screaming.
He said, "Roy, did you punch me?" I told him no. And
he said, "Well, get out of here," so he run across the
top of me. Now in the ballast tank there's only room for one
person to lay; two people can't lay side by side on the deck
of one of those. So he'd went in first, and he'd
crawled back in the corner and went to sleep, and I had to go to sleep
right in under this hole where you get in the ballast tank. Now
I'm ashamed at having to sleep with the War going on, but we
had nothing else to do, and tired and weary, so we had went to sleep
when he woke up screaming. And I thought he'd had a bad
dream. And when we got back out on the deck where there was
lights—see, there was no light at all in there—it
was probably five or ten minutes before he could talk, he was scared
that bad. And when he got so he could talk, he
And walked out through the wall.
And I laughed at him, because I had seen plenty of people scared wake up from a nightmare. But three to four, maybe five months later, he hunted me up one day. He and I had parted company and were working on different shifts, so he hunted me up one day and dropped me a letter from the Defense Department. It came from Washington. And on that letter from the Defense Department, that sailor, that number, the Defense Department described the tattoo on that sailor just exactly the way that this man described it to me on the day that he was scared so bad, was killed in Pearl Harbor aboard "The Honolulu."
That was scary. What did that do to him?
He believed it, and there's no way in this world that you
could
Gosh. Why wouldn't they let you work as much as you wanted to?
Get too much work done.
And they didn't want that to …
Apparently. I still can't understand it.
It's not reasonable, but yet it happened. And
they'd keep me there sometimes fourteen hours a day, and do
two hours' work. Everything that I could have done could have
been done in two to three hours, the way I was used to working in the
mountains. By the time the War was over, I was pretty well sick of that
type of work, so two or three days after the Japanese had surrendered I
quit and came home. School had been going on a few weeks in Lansing, and
I told you I'd quit school. So I had a younger brother that
was going to high school at that time, and he was bragging about what a
good teacher they had at Lansing named Ron Davis. He believed in making
a child mind, and if he told you to move he meant for you to move. Just
a great, great teacher. He wasn't unreasonable; he was just a
good teacher. And I shook hands with him when my brother introduced him
and told him if he had been the principal when I went to school that I
would probably have finished before I left. And he said, "Well,
you can finish anyway. Come on back next week."
And I just joked with her. I was visiting the school. I was going out to hunt me a job and was visiting the school. Well, it wasn't ten minutes till she come with my books, and I would be in her homeroom. And that incident caused me to finish high school. I went that year, passed my grades, and then went the next year and finished. And that was in '47. I graduated from Lansing High School in 1947. The reason that I left Ashe County, there was no jobs, no nothing. By the time you'd get your tobacco raised or whatever, the government would come and cut it down and you couldn't sell it; you couldn't get enough money out of it to last you.
So the government came in and stopped you from growing so much?
Oh, yes, they allowed my dad and mama one-tenth of one acre of tobacco.
That's just terrible.
That's not much tobacco. So that year, '47, I put
out five acres of beans, and I worked hard on them. That was the only
thing I had to do. I wasn't married. And hoeing, fertilized,
following the team of horses over five acres of ground, planting the
beans, getting the beans in the ground, getting them up, hoeing them,
and then it come the great day when I'd make some money off
them. They had growed good; they had a good season that year. And when
it come the
My mother was telling me she did that.
I borrowed the money to pay that. I paid them as they come out of the
field. I had to hire a truck and take them to market at West Jefferson,
and that cost me on average ten cents a bushel, maybe. And while I was
sitting in there, the government man who controlled the price of beans
come up and said that was the prettiest … [ Interruption: In come some people of Mr. Ham's. Mr.
Ham begins to talk to friends for several minutes and talks
again of the story about the "Honolulu."
And they did a television story about that?
Yes.
On "One Step Beyond"?
"One Step Beyond," it was that story. Since I've been working here at Bassett the past five years, this young friend of mine… Let me go back to the beans.
And then I'll finish this later.
That was just terrible.
What I've never been able to understand is why we paid the government man the money to control the price of it, and all he was doing was just drawing the money and writing and wasting pencil. Because that was twenty cents a bushel. The buyer wouldn't give but forty cents, and he had put sixty cents a bushel.
Do you think there was ever something between these government men and the buyers? You think they ever had anything up their sleeves?
No, I never thought that. I thought it was just an idiotic thing, taking our freedoms one by one, when we could pay a government man to something like that, and then he didn't have any more control over anything than that. A waste of money, a waste of time. Maybe he couldn't use his brain for nothing else; I don't know. But it seems like our government has wasted so much that could have been put to good use, just worthless things like that. It has hurt me. It's taught me to distrust my government. I can't help it. Some of the hardest times I ever saw was when our government… One year we didn't have a bite of meat in the house. We weren't asking nobody for nothing. But on this year—it must have been in '36 or '37—our government come and got our next-door neighbor's pigs, twelve of them, and killed them and buried them. And two or three families there with not a bite of meat in the house. Not a bite.
Now why did they do this?
Oh, to run the price of other pigs up.
Did they do this with this man's permission, or did they just come in and kill them?
He kind of begged them to let him give them to some family that needed them. No, that wasn't our government's wishes at that time. That is what has brought us up to what we're in today. Right now it's pretty hard for me to say anything good about our government.
It's kind of ironic that all the people were …
All the people throughout the world that were starving, and that next year our government took millions of bushels of wheat out in the ocean and dumped it. Now we have never paid for those pigs. We have paid interest on the money year after year after year until today. That's still down in this big debt that's hanging over our head. Done nobody no good. The millions of bushels of wheat that was dumped in the ocean in '37 and '38 may have kept us out of the War; if we had just given and helped the hungry people instead of making them fight, maybe things would have been better. I don't know where the Lord was at when all this was going on.
He was still there, I guess.
He was bound to have been there, and some of these days He's going to frown on what we've been doing, maybe.
This time you were talking about when you-all didn't have hardly anything to eat, was that during the Depression, or was that way after?
I don't even remember the Depression.
You were born right after that, I guess.
I was born before… Well, I don't even know what the
I know it. My mother had a problem remembering about it, too.
I've heard so much talk about it. Some people refer to the
good old days when you was making a nickel an hour.
The good old days that the people talk so much about was when they were paying a nickel for a Coca-Cola, but they don't realize that they were making about a nickel an hour and it was taking one hour's work to buy one Coca-Cola, compared to if you're making three dollars an hour now, you'll get fifteen Coca-Cola's for one hour's work.
Is that what that lady was making, working in Bassett?
Yes.
Three dollars an hour, and she's complaining.
This lady was complaining about Coca-Cola's being so high-priced now, twenty cents apiece. Said she could remember the time back when she was making ten cents an hour, that she had money left. A Coca-Cola was just a nickel. And I said, "Lady, if a Coca-Cola was a nickel and you were making ten cents an hour, that took thirty minutes to buy one Coca-Cola, compared to buying fifteen Coca-Cola's now for an hour's work." And she said she had never thought about the good times and bad times that way. She was talking about it nickel for nickel. So I really don't know what the Depression was. I don't want to go back to the times right after the Depression.
Your father was in farming? Is that what he did?
Yes, he was a farmer.
About how many acres did he own?
About ninety acres, I guess. And the government would let us raise one-tenth of one acre of tobacco to raise a family of eight on. At one time we were cut down to one-tenth of an acre. And that just wasn't enough for eight in a family to live on. So when we got old enough we had to scatter out. And there was no jobs. The job that I had taken at the hospital before the War paid me twenty dollars a month for eighty-four hours a week work.
There wasn't any industry back in the county?
No industry whatsoever. No way to make a living. Well, it was so far back, we didn't pipe the sunshine in, but we carried a lot of moonshine with us …
… on Saturday nights. Carried it in gallon jugs.
Did your father ever make any of that?
You would be ashamed.
I had never seen my father drunk, drinking liquor, never. What he done before we got up that old, I don't know.
Did you-all ever drink any, you and all your brothers?
Not while we were at home. We wasn't allowed to. We often went
to church. One night we'd go to one church, maybe up in
Virginia. The next night we'd go up Horse Creek to another
church. Sometimes it'd be eight or ten miles walking. No
automobile. We didn't even have
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[When I got] back to North Carolina, he said, "What happened to
you?" I said, "I went in to listen to the
preacher."
Yes, but I met the sheriff coming out.
So you went in.
I was going in.
(To James) Roy got out of it that way. He was smart.
No, but he searched me one time for a gallon of liquor. Me on the
motorcycle. Now I never had a gallon of liquor in my life. That highway
police scared me the worst I was ever scared in my life.
(To the others) You-all straighten me out if he starts telling
(To James or Robert) It may have been before you and I met.
How young were you then, when they stopped you on the motorcycle?
Twenty-two, I guess. I didn't give them no race, because I was already stopped and right at dark. And in sections of the country, just like you have gangs now, the ones of us from North Carolina, the ones up in Virginia were waiting on us to whip us in gang fights.
Were they just gangs of friends or boys or something? What?
This was the sheriff's, but I thought it was a gang that was after me.
Did these gangs ever get into fights or anything?
Not with me, because it was too easy to run.
Yes, a lot of times they'd fight. It wasn't the gang fights like we have now.
There wasn't anybody killed or nothing like that.
No, but sometimes mighty wrung.
These big gangs, did they have motorcycles, or what kind of gang was it? Did they have automobiles?
That was on foot. There wasn't too many automobiles and cars
back in those days. I have walked… I'd hitch a
ride of
And neither one of us was drinking.
Tell her about running up the telephone pole.
Yeah, I had a run-in with women.
That's true, what he's telling you, but he'll lie to you about the way it happened.
Okay, let's hear about that…
It's something I can't tell, Patty. No, it's not that bad. I was scared of women, especially this one, and she didn't look like this one [like Patty].
And she wasn't as nice a girl as this one. And she made a grab at me, said, "You're the one I want."
Where was this? Where did this happen at?
That was over on Horse Creek at Tuckerdale.
How old were you then, just a young one?
I was twenty or more. And instead of climbing the telephone pole, I clumb the guy wire by my hands like a monkey, faster than she could run.
And I stayed up on the telephone pole till she left.
It's true.
Patty, you're a grown girl. She said she'd been with every man there except me, and she made a grab at me. And until today, if she's still alive, she never caught the one that went up the telephone wire.
Now, James, that sounds kind of bad on you.
Yes, he was there.
Yes, but I wasn't in the '34 Chevrolet.
I don't remember nothing about a '34 Chevrolet.
Well, they'd take those women for a ride.
Well, you're talking.
I know it.
Well, we don't have to talk about that one any more. Changing
Yes.
How many nights a week did you go?
Well, through the summer …
About every night.
You had to walk. There were no automobiles to ride. And they'd have bigger crowds at church then than you have now, because the people enjoyed walking back home. And crowds of us would go five or six miles to church, and then we would all walk home of a night.
What kind of things did you do at the service? Did you-all have a preacher, or was it mainly singing, or what?
It would be for revival services that we'd go every night. I didn't go much to Sunday school. I reckon it was in lieu of the trip home. Enjoyed walking with the crowd. I was afraid to walk by myself; there was too many boogers out.
I've walked backwards many a time to keep a booger from coming
up behind me. One time, we didn't have running water in the
house, and we heard that there was a store in Lansing that had two
sinks. This was back during the War, and we decided if we got up at
three o'clock, we could walk the five miles to Lansing and
buy the sink and then go on to school, to keep someone else from getting
it. So we'd walked a little over a mile. It was around four
o'clock, and you know that's the part of the day
that it's the darkest. Me and my brother got out to where
John Sheets lives, and there was a gap where
… so my brother broke first, and if that man or whatever it was behind us, when we got to the top of the hill he was running pretty fast. We got way into Lansing before dark. Yes, I was scared. Now, had I been the only one that see that, then I would think that I was imagining something. But there was two of us saw the same one. We both spoke. And we thought it was John Sheets, and we asked John about it that afternoon. He said no, he wasn't out that early. And what scared us, it bothered us; it was right behind us within five or six foot of us and not making a bit of racket walking in the gravel.
Were you-all walking then, or were you-all running?
After about twenty foot, we were running.
We would hit the ground about every twenty foot. That was moving on, wasn't it, Robert?
We were going to Lansing to buy a kitchen sink.
Oh, yes, you had said that.
You couldn't find one. That was during the War. And we wanted one to put in the house so we wouldn't have to get up of a morning and go carry a bucket of water. And the way we bought our clothes, we'd gather peppermint, spearmint, elderflowers, dig all kinds of herbs, pick black-berries, anything we could pick and take to the store and sell, we'd do that to help buy our clothes. And my mother made soap out of lye. A little rough; it didn't smell as good as the soap you go to the store and buy today, and a little harder to make than it was to go buy it. And these people that has it so rough now and starving to death and longing for the old days, I wish they had a little bit of that.
Lye soap. That's rough on your skin, too.
In 1949 I had the motorcycle wreck. Had both legs broke. And there was a
city fellow from Newton went up to Horse Creek to go groundhog hunting.
And he was pretty well drunk, and he left his wife there at my
mother's where I was at until him and these other gentlemen
could go groundhog hunting. And they'd been gone a good
little bit, walking across the hill, and he saw a groundhog and he shot
it. And my uncle hollered at him and said, "Good Lord, get on
that groundhog. It's getting away." And he jumped
on, and it was a polecat; it wasn't a groundhog.
By the time he got back to the car, his wife was in the car and ready to
go. And I didn't know that had happened. I saw her jump out
of the car and run. And she blessed him out, and she wouldn't
get
I don't blame her.
So they put him on the back of a truck and took him back to Horse Creek,
because the polecat didn't do any good for the perfume. And
they got to Horse Creek, and they got a gallon of soap belonging to my
Aunt Hattie and took him down to Horse Creek and tried to wash that off
of him, knowing all the time that that lye soap wouldn't do
no good. And they rubbed all the hide off of him
… and still had to bury his clothes. And I hadn't saw him until, say, five or six years ago. That would have been up in twenty years that I hadn't seen the feller since. I met him out where I work one day, and I said, "Hey, you killed any polecats lately?"
He stopped and said, "You're one of them Horse Creekers. You are a Ham or a Brooks, one. Which one are you?"
Did she make that soap to sell?
No, just made it to wash clothes with.
To save some money.
Yes.
So you-all sold tobacco, and then you-all sold your wild plants and stuff. Who bought the wild herbs and stuff that you-all gathered?
At the stores.
And then they bought them for somebody else or something, or what? Do you know what they did with them?
They would take and make chewing gum out of the peppermint and
No, I never heard of that.
Oh, there's plenty of them here. You've saw them plenty of times, up on Buffalo Creek.
I probably didn't call it; I probably just saw it.
Next time you go down the river, you look at those trees that's on both sides of the river. The biggest part of them is bamgillies. They look about like these sycamore trees; they favor them a good bit, except they're slimmer.
Were their leaves good to chew?
No. The buds really smell good when you get them. They're so heavy and sticky. They make some kind of salve out of them, I believe. They have a good healing quality about them.
Did you-all do any other things to make money?
We'd go help the neighbors hoe corn or whatever we could do at small jobs. Even the neighbors didn't have the money in a lot of cases to pay for the work. Now that's not in the Depression; that was many years after the Depression. That's what's got me mixed up about what is good times and what is bad times. I don't know the difference.
It was all kind of the same. That's the way my mother was. She was trying to tell me about it. Did your father have any cattle or anything like that?
You had to have some cattle and some sheep, from time to time
Do you remember that, James?
You had a pet sheep up there, too, didn't you?
You was the one that got on the fence.
And James couldn't get across the fence because the fence was
loose, and he'd got about halfway across it and the sheep
would butt him, go "Ba-a-a-a", and James would swing
out pretty near the wall and come back back at the sheep. And that would
make the sheep mad, and [sheep noise], butt him again.
If you got in a field with a grown buck sheep, you could be in trouble.
Myself and Carl Spencer were walking up the meadow one day to keep from
getting muddy. You see, a car couldn't get up that road in
the wintertime. From October until April or May, an automobile
couldn't get up this highway leaving about a mile. On this
particular day it had been raining. The creek was up; the branch was up.
And the road was so muddy we didn't want to walk it, so we
walked up the meadows. Had to go through the meadow where the fighting
sheep was at. This other gentleman had a stick to keep the sheep off of
us, and he was swinging the stick back and forward and making the old
fighting sheep to stand back. So we'd walk backward going up
the branch, and I gave him a shove. He dropped his stick. The sheeps was
about to get him.
And I was running toward an old beech tree that was standing out above
the fence, and I made the tree before the sheep got me. As I went under
the tree, I grabbed a limb and swung up and went and clumb the tree.
Well, I didn't get up in the tree till about a dozen hornets
had stung me. I had stuck my head in a hornets' nest. I
turned loose of the tree and fell to the ground right by the side of the
sheep. And there was a hornet that popped the sheep right on the nose
And hitting big weeds, and we both laid down right by the side of each
other to get away from the hornets. Every time a hornet would sting that
poor sheep, he'd go, "Ba-a-a, ba-a-a."
Did you-all ever have cockfights or anything like that?
No. I don't think I could have watched anything like that. You
see, I killed a groundhog one time. And I looked down at the
Did you-all go hunting a lot?
No. James did, but I could never kill anything. I was forced to get rid of a cat two or three years ago, and I had to get a neighbor to kill my cat. I didn't have the heart. It had been run over with a car. And I guess that's the reason that's kept me in this shop all these years, making musical instruments. I can't go hunting; I don't like to go fishing; my wife won't let me run around with women.
I had to have something to do.
What kinds of things did you do when you were a kid, to have fun?
We made what they call now Appalachian toys. Some of the first toys I remember would be these blocks; some people call them clackers. They're making them out of plastic now, but we made them out of wood. And we had slingshots that we'd shoot and kill snakes. We made motorcycles.
How did you make those?
Well, we called them motorcycles. They was just something to coast off
the hill. We had to work to push them up the hill, and in some instances
we'd saw the wheels off of a log of black gum. We had brakes
on them. We had springs on the seats, but the way they were constructed,
if you hit a rock with the front wheel it would throw you,
And we'd push those up the hill. It'd take us a whole lot longer to push them up the hill than it would to come down. That was in the summer that we'd do that. In the winter we always had bobsleds that we'd make out of wood, and put cradle fingers on the runners to make them run faster. Anything we could do to get up a little more speed. One winter we were going to put a set of wings on the bobsled and fly it across the branch. I like to froze to death that day, because it didn't work.
Just got to the branch.
It just got to the branch, right in the branch.
You were telling a story earlier about going swimming and everything.
is on the
spot. There was four of us boys. I'd say we were thirteen or
fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and we were going swimming. We
didn't have bathing suits like you've got now.
When you come to a place deep enough, you just went swimming.
… keeping an eye on us, keeping us in the water. My toenail was about to come off over there; it froze.
Did your daddy make you work a whole bunch, or did you-all think it was just…
We thought we had to work hard… Mountain life, I guess, is the best life there is. But for a kid that wants to do something, play, work is hard. Hoeing corn, beans, potatoes.
But then you got to go out and have your fun afterwards, then.
One of the things that I can't understand, I don't
know where it came from or what has happened to it, but we had a game
the first day of May every year. A group of people would get together,
and they'd go and hang a May basket. Picked the first flowers
they could find, and if they go up to a neighbor's porch and
throw that basket on the porch and holler, "May
basket!" people in the house were obligated to catch every
person in the crowd. And sometimes it would take till twelve or
I remember doing something like that when I was a little kid.
We'd take bundles of flowers and go and leave them up on
people's porch and ring the doorbell and run. But we never
had them chase us.
In that section of the country they felt obligated to catch every person in the crowd. And the first one that the old farmer could catch, if she was a young, pretty girl, he got to kiss her.
She would run to get away from him.
I see why they'd run now.
But sometimes ladies would dress up like men to keep the men from kissing them. Well, after a hard day's work of plowing, I don't see how the old farmers had the energy for that.
But they all, at that time in life, everybody looked forward to the first day of May. And sometimes we'd do that the entire month of May. Every night somewhere, somebody would be doing that.
And you'd get in big crowds to go around and do this?
Oh, yes. The bigger the crowd, the more you could laugh and holler and
have a good time. You didn't laugh out loud until after
you'd hung your May basket. That was supposed to be a
surprise. Catch
Did you have a lot of music around you all the time? Like in your family, did people play?
Not in my family. There was no music. We had one old Victrola that my daddy had won at a sale. They had wrote everybody's name down and drawed a name out, and my daddy won it. And he couldn't stand music. He liked music, but the people that played it, he thought they were all lazy and wouldn't work. If they played music through the day when you could do a little farming …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I wanted to ask you about your first dulcimer. How did you get to making musical instruments? How did you ever get interested in that?
Everywhere that there was a gathering, some of the mountain people had
some of their instruments along and played. And I always loved fiddling,
banjo picking, or anything. And the nearest I ever come
And it was an hour before I got so I could talk. Now being able to do
that eased it a little bit, but I had never been on stage again until
just recently. It was thirty years before I was able to get back on
stage in front of people again, because of that one incident. But last
summer, which was twenty-nine years from the year that that happened
then, this old lady here in Newton asked me to take her to the mountains
with me on Saturday morning. I agreed to take her, and about six or
eight miles from where this incident took place is where she was going.
And I'd never been over there in all these years, twenty-nine
years that I had never been to this road since, where this lady was
going. And when we got to where she was going, instead of sitting her
out by the side of the road, after driving a hundred miles I took her on
up to the house and knocked on the door to see if there was anybody at
home. I didn't want to leave her there by herself. I knocked
on the door, and a real old, grey-headed man came to the door. The only
thing that he could say was, "My God, Roy Ham. The last time I
saw you, you turned a flipflop off of the stage at Lansing. You just
made a durn fool out of the feller that was a-picking the
banjo." And in the past six months, that has helped me a
million times, what that one gentleman said, knowing that the people
didn't remember me as being the person that had lost his
voice and got stage fright and scared to death; they remembered me as
the one who turned a flip off of the stage in the crowd. The reason the
people had known me, I had put up rope swings there in the gym a few
weeks before that, and I had turned flips off of the ropes, and they
broke with me and left me
I was the only person in that whole… Was you there that night? (To James, his brother) Well, I guess you jumped up, too, because there wasn't a soul there setting.
Were they afraid you were going to get hurt?
They knew I was going to be killed.
Because, see, I had jumped from the ropes and hung my heels over this bar and was swinging on the bar by my heels, after I had turned loose from the swings. But what I done, I had swung it up this way and got it over the crowd and had turned the flip up here over the crowd. And that had already unnerved them, and when I turned that flip they thought I was going to land in them. I went back the other way and turned loose and hung by my heels on this other bar, and that's when it broke.
How did you learn to do all that?
Swinging on grapevine.
That was the monkey in him.
Like Robert said, the monkey that was in me. We used to see how far we
could go, swinging from limbs up there in the mountains. We
… but we enjoyed what we could do. And a lot of times in the winter… People talking back then about they could take five dollars and buy all their groceries. They didn't buy all their groceries; they just bought the seasoning to go in the groceries. The groceries, in a lot of cases, dug in a hole and put out here in under the snow. And you could rabbit hunt in the winter, and you knew where a certain pile in the snow was at. And you'd go out there and dig in under that, and some of the hillbillies had their apples laying on the ground with straw cover and snow, and that snow would keep the apples all winter. And that was good eating …
… if you went rabbit hunting.
When did you first start making dulcimers?
I don't remember the year. I had been making violins.
How did you first learn how to make your violins?
I made my first fiddle out of a cornstalk. We had always made our
Christmas toys out of wood. The little men that can dance on a board,
slingshots. Everything like that was handmade. And we enjoyed playing
with them at the time, but we learned to hate them, all of them, because
we wanted store-bought toys. And now that's what the children
want, is these handmade toys now. No way that I can furnish what the
people want, even right around here, just wooden toys. But the first
dulcimer that I ever saw… Now you've